How much of your salary should you be spending on housing costs? What do you actually spend? We decided to devote a post to this topic after seeing an interesting discussion about readers’ rent/mortgage payments as compared to their incomes. Before getting to specifics about housing: The general 50/20/30 rule for budgeting is still commonly accepted advice. The guideline was made … Read More about What Should Your Monthly Housing Costs Be?

How does buying a home affect your finances? How can you best prepare for it? This is a huge topic, but we’re going to attempt to take it on as part of our Money Milestones series, which explores how a few big milestones in your life can really affect your finances. So far we’ve looked at … Read More about Tales from the Wallet – Buying a Home

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What kind of insurance do young working women need? Reader D wonders… Kat, I’m wondering if you would consider a post about certain types of insurance such as life insurance, disability insurance, and umbrella policies? I’m wondering how people decide on buying additional insurance beyond what may be included in work benefits? Great question! (Pictured: … Read More about Tales From the Wallet: Insurance Fun!

You always see personal finance articles advising you what to do at the end of the year — but I see far fewer of them advising what to do financially in the beginning of the year. Personally, I like to do two things around now: a) I take a “financial snapshot,” and b) I make … Read More about Tales from the Wallet: Setting Financial Goals

2017 Update: We still stand by this advice on how to decorate your first real apartment — links have also been updated below. Reader R wonders about how to decorate her first apartment after grad school… I’m about to graduate law school and will be moving into my first “grown up” apartment soon. I’ve never really … Read More about How to Decorate Your First Real Apartment

2017 update: See our new post about investing money in retirement accounts vs. saving cash. We’ve also made some updates below. Something I’ve been thinking a lot about since I read it is this Mint article on “The Value of Tax-Deferred Savings.” According to the article, “[u]nless you make enough money to max out all of … Read More about Tales from the Wallet: Tax-Savvy Investments

2015 Update: Check out our latest discussion on buying a home. When should you consider buying an apartment or house to call your own? What should you know before you start the process? When I asked the readers last week what sort of financial topics they wanted to talk about, a number of people chimed … Read More about Tales from the Wallet: Thoughts on Buying Property

Last week we asked: How has the recession affected your spending and saving habits? Although we’re all peeking through our fingers as we check on our 401Ks and various accounts, the good news is that it hasn’t affected us that much. 46% of voters said they weren’t doing anything differently 28% of voters are looking … Read More about Poll Results: Recession, Smession

Coffee Break, originally uploaded by bitzcelt – Interesting review of an Title VII case out of Pennsylvania wherein a receptionist was fired nine minutes after sending an e-mail telling her two male bosses she would not get them coffee every day at 3 p.m. The judges said that because there had never been a … Read More about Weekly Round-Up